pafp I’VE GOT PEOPLE TO PROTECT [med den visit]

༄༄ Disgusting is the simplest word that Scorchstreak can think of to describe the disease-ridden cretin that Cottonsprig had brought into the clan before disappearing into thin air. Now left behind, the little carrion-crawler must be fed, and Scorchstreak has taken it upon herself to deliver her meal for today. Wolfsong’s den is as unfamiliar as SkyClan’s camp to the calico, avoided at all costs, and her lip curls as the stench of herbs hits her like a wall when she steps through the entrance.

It doesn’t take her long to find the kit, a mess of black and white fur that reeks of contagion. As she approaches, she spots one dual-toned eye, and her pelt bristles. "What are you looking at?" She questions—softer than a snap, but more harsh a tone than she would offer to a kit that did not threaten the clan’s very existence. There is no immediate clue that this sickness is the same that killed Weaselclaw and many more of her friends, but it was around this time last year that cats began to fall ill, wasn’t it?

(Perhaps she’s grown too paranoid. Too distrustful, too unwilling to put forth effort and build bridges. Quietly, she wonders: despite all her efforts, do her paws still tread the same path that Sootstar’s once did? The path leads only to a swift fall from grace, a crooked memory bathed in blood. An unmarked mass grave. A legacy tarnished.)

Suddenly stricken, the deputy attempts to hold her ever-stoic mask together even as her chest seizes with dread. She scoops up the small mole she’d caught earlier in the day, nose wrinkling as her teeth sink lightly into flesh. The prey is deposited before the kit, and Scorchstreak gestures to it with a paw. "Eat up," she says. "After the trouble Cottonsprig went through to bring you here, it wouldn’t do for you to wither away." If the kit has no appetite, then feeding her is out of the calico’s control, but she can at least encourage the little rot-runt to try a bite.

  • ooc: @LUNGWORTKIT
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  • SCORCHSTREAK ❯❯ she/they, deputy (tunneler) of windclan
    small, slim flame-streaked calico with fiery golden eyes. cold and closed-off, ferociously protective of her clanmates. rarely seen aboveground.
    mate to bluepool ; sibling to rattleheart & rabbitclaw
    mentor to bilberrypaw ; previously mentored pinkshine
    peaceful and healing powerplay permitted, but may react aggressively
    penned by foxlore
 
CW : Mild gore mentions / generally gross eating of prey.
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Lungwortkit likes to watch the cats who run on a constant track in and out of Wolf's den. In a world delineated in darkness and herb - scent and a permanent haze, they are interesting in their newness. She finds it easy to tell many things about a visitor from watching them, examining the way they look and the way they move. Observation is instinctual to her in the way that play - fighting and hunting are somehow not, her eye one of her few abilities yet unhindered by her sickness. Examining the set of their fur or the cast of their eye in the dim, she can determine how they might behave outside of this foggy bubble in time.

Today's visitor, for instance, is small and compact in a way that makes Lungwortkit raise one white paw to contemplate its similar slimness. Her pelt is coarse and snagged with dirt, and it bristles into spires when she lays eyes on Lungwortkit. Her two clear golden eyes are blaze - bright, one of them crossed by a scar. The child stares curiously at her with a wide two - toned eye, a lank tuft of black fur hanging between it and the closed one. She claws her way up to a sitting position with a thickened wheeze, wing - imitation markings bristling across her skinny shoulders.

" Lookin' at you, " she proclaims in a sickly rasp, as if this fact closes the issues lurking beneath the surface of Scorchstreak's brusque words. Her crescent claws are sunk into her tattered moss nest, the piece of bedding often made into a scratching post for the kitten as she languishes in its depths. A mole lands before her with a thump, and Lungwortkit's lone eye is alight with a ferocious hunger that outsizes her puny body. She seizes its furred sides with both paws and buries her mucus - clotted muzzle in its flesh, burrowing her milk - teeth into the meat until she can bite and tear, until she is sated and blood coats her chin.

" Cotton? " she echoes hopefully, lifting her head from her conquest as if the blue - smoked medicine cat might suddenly manifest in the den's dim depths. Clumsily, a small pink tongue swipes her jaws in a half - there attempt to clean off the bits of prey - flesh spattered there. Her eye scrutinizes the gorse walls, waiting for a freckled pelt to appear. " 'S Cotton here? "
 
Worry turns her eyes and ears toward the Medicine Den. And was that a good thing or a bad thing? Worry was a feeling that toed the line of good and bad real delicate - like. When worry turned to sadness, then it is absolutely bad. Wobbly uncertainness just turns dreary and grey and blegh... but then again, its worrying that makes her super helpful, isn't it? As helpful as she can be, without being a Medicine Cat, anyways. Was it better to get close and help the sick, or stay away and stay healthy? She's kind of made up her mind without even knowing the answer... One of those options just seemed so much... ruder than the other one.

This way, Pinkshine could check on Scorchstreak and the sick cats at the same time! She pokes her head in, calico - striped tail in an idle sway behind her. The tone that Scorchstreak meets Lungwortkit with is surprising (or is it? Pinkshine guesses she doesn't really know how Scorchstreak was around kits... but it wsa a little bit tougher than she always had to be, wasn't it?) Well, it's not like she's being being mean, just a little bit weird, and poor Lungwortkit would appreciate the meal, right?

It's like super sad though, the way her eyes light up at Cottonsprig's name. It's so sad, Pinkshine could absolutely cry, but... sh e's not gonna. Is it up to her to break the news? Re - break it? " Uhm, no... " Pinkshine tells her, a pitying look in her eyes. " N-not yet! We're gonna find her! " she says, and she sounds way more decisive and sure and stuff about it than she actually is... How many times as she said that, now? " Cotton... soon! " It'd be better if se changed the subject, wouldn't it be?

" Um... Hey, you're hungry, though! That's good! " she then remarks, and if Scorchstreak were to look her way, she'd great her with brightened eyes and a mouthed word: Hi!
 

"Lungwortkit, are you alright? Can I get anything for you?" Celandinepaw's concerned voice peeked through the errant conversation, hushed as though it would not disturb the pools of quietude in the medicine cat den, a false sense of security much akin to dressing up a thornbush in satins and velvets in hopes that it would become more inviting. She hadn't done the best job at comfort during the plague, that was for sure. Snapping back at perceived threats, she could not compose herself as gracefully or as wistfully as Wolfsong could. She existed as a bundle of emotions, not an ideal of her predestination. The glassy-eyed kitten mentioned Cottonsprig, to which Celandinepaw's own chest tightened at the very mention, as though the roiling waters of her heart had not been allayed by the flint-colored molly's absence. Scorchstreak had been less compassionate than Pinkshine (at least outwardly, to the medicine cat apprentice) about the prospects of the medicine cat coming back. At least Lungwortkit still bore an appetite, at least there was still life kicking and fighting to not be extinguished by the unpalpable, innumerable mass of death itself. "Pinkshine's right. She's going to come back very soon, okay? And she'll probably tell you all about her adventures away from Windclan." She afforded the bicolored child a taut smile, as though cloistered in the requiem for an ever-bright optimism, now dulled and abraded by the harsh reality of her destiny. To the trained eye, it was clearer than there had been less light dwelling within the molly than what had existed before. That twinkle of naivete did not bleed into wheat-hued gaze, though the canvas of her eyes had not become completely starless - simply less numbered.

  • OOC:
  • ( NOTE: Reference is a placeholder until a drawn reference can be supplied. Credit HERE )​
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  • —— CELANDINEPAW / She/They/He / 12 Moons
    —— Medicine Cat Apprentice of Windclan / Mentored by Wolfsong
    —— A shorthaired golden spotted tabby with yellowish-green eyes. Somewhat pudgy, though lean and able to hold her ground in the wild.
    —— Extroverted and unafraid to speak their mind, she is a friendly and affable face in Windclan. Though ditzy and somewhat cowardly, she tries her best to help her clan.
    —— Penned by Tempest. Contact on Discord (naruk4mi) for plots and threads.